What if Obama Wins the White House?

Let's assume we all end up singing "Hail to the Chief" to the new president, Barack Obama. He is the "Change President," so how will he change the economy, the war, the relations between races?

Check it out:

Obama has proposed a pile of economic fixes, including a $210 billion jobs program. Overlooked in the news on Pastor Wright was a cute move in the U.S. Senate a few days ago in which Republicans packaged up the Obama economic plan and said let's pass this into law now. The $1.5 trillion Obama economic plan went down to defeat 97 to zip. Even Obama voted against it.

On the war — Wednesday, Obama gave a big war speech in which he took yet another bow for being against it from the start. As usual he said he'd bring home two brigades a month until all troops were out except for those needed to protect American emplacements and to strike at Al Qaeda if it reforms. For starters, Al Qaeda isn't quite gone from Iraq, so I’d like to know how many Americans it's going to take to get that job done before we leave behind an Al Qaeda SWAT team.

But worse, in the same speech Obama expanded on his previously stated position to redeploy to Afghanistan to stamp out the Taliban there. Now he wants to open up a new front inside Pakistan. Of course, he famously hinted at that once before, but Wednesday's more fulsome explanation of the Pakistan plan looks an awful lot like a new ground war in a new country for large numbers of American troops.

And when it comes to race, I’m trying to remain forward-looking. But Obama's much-praised race speech only seems to have cemented his relationship with blacks while fracturing his ties to whites.

So change adds up to controversial interventionism in the economy, giving up war in once place and starting one somewhere else, and race relations transformed from a thorny issue to an explosive one. You only have to look at the attack on our colleague Griff Jenkins Wednesday after he interviewed Jesse Jackson. A black reporter was so confrontational and borderline violent that the Reverend Jackson himself had to step in and back the man down. It was a change in white-black relations that appeared not for the better.